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28 Days of Beautiful Things

The wonder of the winter snow drifting and blowing wears down to threadbare chill, bitter and dark: when will spring be here, we groan, but there’s still February, still another month (at least) of bundling and shoveling and crumpled Kleenexes in pockets. What can stir the spirit along wi
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Beet

I sliced a beet in half and discovered that it has rings. Rings like you would find on a tree stump to mark its age--one ring, one year.But beets are young, have only known one spring, one summer, one early fall, perhaps also one winter passed inside in a dark, dry box. So what could each ring repre
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Morning

When my infant daughter wakes at two in the morning and her father cannot coax her back to sleep, she and I curl up on the mattress in the guest room below the big window, and I drift off with her tiny fingers gripping my thumb.At dawn she sits up and stares out at the world so long and so hard that
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Hymn

This morning at church I plunked out the four parts of an old hymn while above my chords the congregation’s voices took flight. And I thought of geese bursting up together from the edge of a pond where they had been napping and squabbling and pecking for fish.Sometimes it is hard for me to bel
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Dust

I was struck today by a couple of things--the perfume of hyacinths, a woman with white hair that hung down to the backs of her knees--but I have finally settled on dust.I had planned to dust today--had written it down on my list of things to do--but the baby was sick and in need of holding, and I wr
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Benediction

Today, a work day, I made it through one class and graded half a stack of essays before the daycare called to tell me my daughter had spiked another fever. I have missed too much work already; I am haggard, forgetful, behind. But leaving campus I noticed the first magnolia trees of the season coming
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Snake

This afternoon a friend brought over, among other things, a garter snake she had rescued from her cat. There was also the armful of forsythia branches she left on my porch, the violets she picked for my daughter, but the snake I held in my hands--let its head rest over my knuckles, its cool, lazy mu
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Cold

My little love is still sick--her nose a broken egg, her coughs like tiny barks. She has been sick for a couple of days, but today was the first day she grabbed on to my shirt and wouldn’t let go. I am thirty-one years old. I have done a few things of which I am proud. But I don’t believ
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Cardinal

Had it not been for the vainglorious crimson cardinal strutting up and down the branches of our lilac tree, I might not have noticed the discreet female who landed on a nearby branch and pretended to be interested in something else.She reminded me of myself at sixteen--plain but curious, aloof, the
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Papers

My husband took the babe away early this morning so that I could spend the entirety of today marking the first drafts of my students’ research papers. I have tried so hard to find beauty in my work--in the patching of logic, the mending of sentences, the reshuffling of words.And my work is bea
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Home

This afternoon, before the youths from our church arrived at our house, I was distracted by the scarred baseboards and stained carpets and how much the kitchen walls needed washing.But then our guests shuffled in and I remembered that all my life I have wanted a home where people sprawl out over the
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Green

Today, weary of traffic, I took the back roads home. Now is the season of every green imaginable--the wet emerald of grass, the pale lime of newly broken buds, the chartreuse shock of fresh algae, the midnight fir of country lakes.When we die we don’t seem half as dead as the weeping willow th
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Dishes

When I was twelve years old and so afraid of dying, I wrote in my journal that maybe by the time I grew old I would be ready. Perhaps after ninety years, after approximately 32,400 breakfasts and lunches and dinners and nighttimes, I would be weary of life.Today after supper, my husband rocked the b
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Writing

I was dense today, rushed. I kept losing important things--the keys, the phone, my daughter’s pacifier. I forgot to keep an eye out for something beautiful.But I do have this quiet moment--pecking out words with one hand, cradling the babe with the other. It’s the only way I write anymor
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Bicycle

After work I fetched my bicycle from the shop where they had tuned it up--wrapped my Ram’s Horn handlebars with fresh tape, tightened the brakes, flossed the cassette until it sparkled. In truth, it is my mother’s bike--her first bike--a now-vintage twelve-speed Schwinn.We have spent a g
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